ICO Partners Part 1
Thomas Bidaux discusses free-to-play on console and what makes the UK one of the toughest in Europe
It's one of the most difficult territories in Europe for online games. In many ways it's more difficult to do business in the UK than it is in the US. The UK is very focused on console - I'm not talking about the industry, I'm talking about the audience. Online is actually bigger in the US, strangely enough.
I think that there's lots to be done, but I think the only people who've cracked it are Jagex and Moshi Monsters, people who are local. All our clients have found that the UK has been one of their most challenging territories. One of the reasons is that there are very few media which are UK specific - you know that better than I do. Because of that it's very difficult to target the UK.
But also because of that it has one of the biggest potentials.
I think also what we hear a lot is a misconception about the UK, from American or Asian clients who want to get into Europe with an English version. Traditionally the UK is not going to represent the majority of players on English speaking servers. That's going to be Scandanavian, Dutch, Eastern European, places where there's no localised version. The UK's going to be a significant part, but not the majority. Many clients who don't know the market that well think that having an office in the UK and launching a game in English in Europe means 60 per cent UK players. But as online, and especially browser-based aren't that big in the UK yet, it's usually not the case.
There's a lot of education to do there. I'm very curious to see the evolution of the UK consumer market, where there's going to be more MMOs and free-to-play games on console, because the UK market is very focused on console.
I think I heard that Microsoft are actually pushing for free-to-play on XBLA next year or something like that. For me that would be a miracle, that would be awesome. Free-to-play can happen on the console more than the MMO. MMO RPG's require too much communication - you need to chat. Voice chat doesn't work for them. Session based games, smaller online experiences, with RPG elements - free-to-play to make it accessible for everybody - that's obvious. It could work pretty well on the consoles.
Back when I was at NCsoft, my team and I signed an exclusive deal with Sony. The reason we signed with Sony was that it was impossible to sign with Microsoft. We couldn't have done what we wanted to do. We wanted a free-to-play game, we wanted to run our own servers. We wanted to run our own games. Sony was like, okay, whatever - you're NCsoft, you know your online stuff, you can do it. Microsoft was blocking at every possible stage. Not because they didn't want it - I had the best meetings with Microsoft people. They were saying "it could be awesome if you could do this, this and this, but it doesn't fit into the form, we have to tick the boxes."
I think I heard that Microsoft are actually pushing for free-to-play on XBLA next year. For me that would be a miracle
They were very disappointed with themselves. So we did an exclusive with Sony and got all the perks that go along with that. So I would expect it to happen on Sony. My experience with Microsoft was that it will never happen there. Maybe free-to-play will just skip consoles and just stay with PC.
Online is a very big selling point for Xbox. Microsoft has always pushed XBL, for quality, for multiplayer, for exclusive DLC for Call of Duty. So if they had that flexibility they'd need for MMOs and purely online games, that would be great. Back when Nexon announced the free-to-play version of Dungeon Fighter, the next day Microsoft said that the Xbox version wouldn't be free-to-play.
Dungeon Fighter would be perfect for Xbox, but it didn't happen in the end - well, it did, but not free-to-play. It's a big barrier to entry, even if it's selling for £5, that's still going to drive away more than half the userbase.
They're launching free-to-play PC games now, so maybe they'll get involved.
It's going to be extremely disruptive. I think maybe they're scared of the disruption. If you think about it, if you have a device that's purely for games, and you have a game that's free on that device, I think it'd be such a success that it would drive a lot of activity to those games. So what do you do with all your other partners? I think it'd be scary. I think it's going to kill some business, but not Microsoft's business, it's going to drive it.
Back at NCsoft, the project we had, I was excited. I think the game was going to be good, but even if it's just a good game, not the best game, just good, because it's free we're going to get amazing penetration. We wouldn't need to do any marketing because people would just give it a try because it's free.
It's a shame NCsoft canned it. They had good reasons to can it, back in 2008, but in 2011 I think things would have looked very different.